What To Know About Rabat The Capital of the nation since 1912, elegant and spacious RABAT is the very image of an orderly administrative and diplomatic centre. Lacking the frenetic pace of Morocco’s other large cities, Rabat is sometimes harshly referred to as “provincial”. Sure enough, there are times when it’s hard to find a café open much past ten at night, but there’s other times when the city comes out from its conservatism and even makes a little noise, such as the during the Festival of Rhythms each May. Befitting its regal status, Rabat – along with neighbouring Salé – has some of the most interesting historic and architectural monuments in the country, and the fact that the local economy does not depend on tourist money makes exploring these attractions a great deal more relaxed than cities like Fez and Marrakesh.
The Phoenicians established a settlement at Sala, around the citadel known today as Chellah. This eventually formed the basis of an independent Berber state, which reached its peak of influence in the eighth century, developing a code of government inspired by the Koran but adapted to Berber customs and needs. It represented a challenge to the Islamic orthodoxy of the Arab rulers of the interior, however, and to stamp out the heresy, a ribat – the fortified monastery from which the city takes its name – was founded on the site of the present-day kasbah. The ribat’s presence led to Chellah’s decline – a process hastened in the eleventh century by the founding of a new town, Salé, across the estuary.
The Almohads rebuilt the kasbah and, in the late twentieth century, Yacoub el Mansour (“the Victorious”) created a new imperial capital here. His reign lasted almost thirty years, allowing El Mansour to leave a legacy that includes the superb Oudaïa Gate of the kasbah, Bab er Rouah at the southwest edge of town, and the early stages of the Hassan Mosque. He also erected over 5km of fortifications, though it is only in the last sixty years that the city has expanded to fill his circuit of pisé walls.
The most beautiful of Moroccan ruins, Chellah is a startling sight as you emerge from the long avenues of the Ville Nouvelle. Walled and towered, it seems a much larger enclosure than the map suggests. The site has been uninhabited since 1154, when it was abandoned in favour of Salé across the Bou Regreg. But for almost a thousand years prior to that, Chellah (or Sala Colonia, as it was known) had been a thriving city and port, one of the last to sever links with the Roman Empire and the first to proclaim Moulay Idriss founder of Morocco’s original Arab dynasty. An apocryphal local tradition maintains that the Prophet himself also prayed at a shrine here.
Under the Almohads, the site was already a royal burial ground, but most of what you see today, including the gates and enclosing wall, is the legacy of “The Black Sultan”, Abou el Hassan (1331–51), the greatest of the Merenids. The main gate has turreted bastions creating an almost Gothic appearance. Its base is recognizably Almohad, but each element has become inflated, and the combination of simplicity and solidity has gone. An interesting technical innovation is the stalactite (or “honeycomb”) corbels which form the transition from the bastion’s semi-octagonal towers to their square platforms; these were to become a feature of Merenid building. The Kufic inscription above the gate is from the Koran and begins with the invocation: “I take refuge in Allah, against Satan.”
To your left if coming from the entrance, signposted “Site Antique”, are the main Roman ruins. They are of a small trading post dating from 200 BC onwards, are well signposted and include a forum, a triumphal arch, a Temple of Jupiter and a craftsmen’s quarter.
The most ambitious of all Almohad buildings, the Hassan Mosque was, in its time, the second largest mosque in the Islamic world, outflanked only by the one in Smarra, Iraq. Though little remains today apart from its vast tower, or minaret, its sheer size still seems a novelty.
The mosque was begun in 1195 – the same period as Marrakesh’s Koutoubia and Seville’s Giralda – and was designed to be the centrepiece of Yacoub el Mansour’s new capital in celebration of his victory over the Spanish Christians at Alarcos, but construction seems to have been abandoned on El Mansour’s death in 1199. Its extent must always have seemed an elaborate folly – Morocco’s most important mosque, the Kairaouine in Fez, is less than half the Hassan’s size, but served a much greater population. Rabat would have needed a population of well over 100,000 to make adequate use of the Hassan’s capacity, but the city never really took off under the later Almohads and Merenids; when Leo Africanus came here in 1600, he found no more than a hundred households, gathered for security within the kasbah.
The existence of so many ancient, walled Medinas in Morocco – intact and still bustling with life – is largely due to Marshal Hubert Lyautey, the first of France’s Resident Generals, and the most sympathetic to local culture. In colonizing Algeria, the French had destroyed most of the Arab towns, and Lyautey found this already under way when he arrived in Rabat in 1912, but, realizing the aesthetic loss – and the inappropriateness of wholesale Europeanization – he ordered demolition to be halted and had the Ville Nouvelle built outside the walls instead. His precedent was followed throughout the French and Spanish zones of the country, inevitably creating “native quarters”, but preserving continuity with the past. Lyautey left Morocco in 1925 but when he died in 1934 he was returned and buried in a Moorish monument in Rabat until 1961, when his body was “repatriated” to Paris.
The contrast of magnificent architecture and unforgettable history makes Casablanca a fascinating place to visit. It is the amazing city that is gaining in popularity every year as it becomes cheaper to fly to Morocco.
Morocco had always been a country I was curious about. It’s blend of North African and Arabic influences gave it this air of mystique that drew me in. Plus, you know, I like couscous. So I had high expectations when I decided to pop over from Spain and explore the country for three weeks.
